


Forth They Went Together

by ProlixInSpace



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas carol, Day after Christmas, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Feast of St. Stephen, Gen, Good King Wenceslas, Midwinter, Snow, Winter, Winter Solstice, charity - Freeform, no betas we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:35:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21956002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProlixInSpace/pseuds/ProlixInSpace
Summary: A Retelling of the story told in the famous Christmas song, "Good King Wenceslas," starring our favorite father-daughter dark mage duo. Happy Holidays.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Forth They Went Together

**Author's Note:**

> I had a slow day at work, please enjoy the thing my brain squeezed out. Enjoy your end-of-year celebrations, one and all. (If you follow me and are going "didn't you do something with Good King Wenceslas last year" the answer is yes, in a totally different fandom, structured differently, also there can never be enough Good King Wenceslas.)

Ordinarily, by now, a light dusting of snow might have coated the quiet castle, minded only by the staff who volunteered (for additional pay) to stay behind to keep it in receiving condition for the royal family when they returned from their stay at the lodge. 

_ Ordinarily, _ Viren and  _ both  _ of his children would be  _ at  _ the lodge with them, sitting by roaring fires, reading late into the night, drinking mulled wine, and celebrating the passing of midwinter with songs and stories and sweets. 

Even with all they’d accomplished, everything they’d built, the western regions -- Katolis and Duren in particular -- were still beneath the heel of the seasons to great extent, and  _ Ordinarily,  _ making it to this point in the winter without a serious challenge to the health and well-being of the people was a cause for celebration, a great letting out of a tense breath.  _ Halfway through it,  _ went the thought that whorled among them like the cold, dry wind.

This year was far from ordinary. 

Perhaps it had been a mistake, to stay behind another few days. 

A week prior, Soren had returned from a hunting expedition. Not only were they extremely successful with regard to the meat they’d set out for in the first place, but during it, he’d stumbled across (of all things) a moonstrider. How and why it had crossed the lava on its own was a mystery. The fact that Soren had even recognized it as something to keep aside in one piece without field-dressing it for steaks was nothing short of  _ miraculous.  _ (Even if he  _ had  _ rather contaminated the brain in the process of collection, there was no reason to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.) __

The last thing Viren was about to do was waste that bounty. He’d set about processing the thing immediately -- most of the blood had been rendered unusable by time and travel, but some of the viscera were in entirely reasonable condition. One thing was for sure, though, he had to do this largely on his own, or with Claudia exclusively assisting.

Anyone else would only make a mess of things. 

His attention was consumed with desiccating the paws, recovering marrow from the bones, pulling the horns from their roots, preparing the hide of the tail for infusions, and he’d lost track of time completely. 

When someone-or-other had knocked and said that everyone was getting ready to leave for the lodge, well, it had seemed only natural to simply put off the journey by a few days. He knew the way well enough and there was no reason he couldn’t join the festivities with this job properly and completely done. 

If he could go back and do it all again, he’d at least send Claudia along with Soren and the others, but she had protested --  _ Dad, come on, it’ll be easier with the two of us, _ and she was right, which made it all the more difficult to put his foot down on the matter. 

If she wanted to remain until the work was done, well, maybe that was a good attitude to be fostering anyway.

Then the snow had come. 

It was a blizzard of historic proportions, and it swept unexpectedly off the sea and struck the lodge first. Everyone was thankfully safe (according to a letter carried by an exhausted crow that had barely made it home ahead of the wind) and the traveling party had arrived just in time. That said, no one was getting in or out of anywhere in the region. That was the last missive for awhile. The storm then cut a path through the woods after that, covering everything in a blanket of white the height of a child, and lingering around the castle and the surrounding towns long enough to completely paralyze it all.

Only once the shrill scrape and bay of the wind had died down did anyone dare to venture out of chambers. It took effort for Viren to shove open the door onto the snow-covered parapet walk, and there, he surveyed the changed landscape. Claudia wasn’t far behind him, having apparently inherited more than her fair share of his curiosity.

Dark had fallen, and the storm had moved on. The sky was cold and clear, the moon as sharp and white as fractured bone. Its light hit the snow, and the snow sent it back again, casting the scene in a strange glow unlike day, but seemingly unlike night as well. The silence made it feel only stranger, nearly all noise absorbed by the powder that likewise softened every angle beneath its rounded dunes. 

“Dad it’s…” Claudia trailed off in a tight sigh through her teeth, her voice as awed as it was anxious. “I... guess we’re not going to the Banther lodge. But--it’s okay. It’s fine. We’ll have a… father-daughter holiday.”

Only a year or two ago she would have delighted in the snow and nothing more, but the weight on her words betrayed that she had reached an age where she could extrapolate the problems that were to come. Not only that, but she’d rushed to manage  _ his  _ feelings. Wasn’t she too young still to be worrying about things like that? Shouldn’t he be the one trying to ameliorate  _ her  _ disappointment rather than the other way around?

It felt like a string on Viren’s heart being snapped, that one of the filters of youth had been pulled from her eyes, that she had to see the danger and difficulty here, and not only the beauty.

Time had passed too quickly.

In the midst of the thought, something caught his eye. At the edge of the wood, where it curved away from the castle to follow the icy river, a small, dark figure moved among the bright ground, carving paths in the drift. 

“Who  _ is  _ that?” Viren muttered to himself, not even meaning to begin a conversation on the matter, simply accustomed to thinking out loud. It seemed uncannily bold to be out in this.

“Who? What?” Claudia had been looking elsewhere, but now she followed his gaze. “Oh, that guy.”

Viren turned, and regarded her with a furrowed brow. “That… guy? How can you even tell who it is at this distance?” He knew that his eyes were going, little by little, but they weren’t  _ that  _ bad yet, were they?

“I mean, I’m not  _ sure,  _ but…” She squinted, as if trying to verify her guess. “If it’s who I think it is… it’s gotta be.”

“Well?” 

“Okay,” Claudia pointed, “You see where the river bends? You know how there’s that little pond just past there, kind of like an… elbow, or something?”

“Agnen Fountain,” Viren said, naming the feature, though it would be frozen over now. “Yes.”

“Remember when I went out looking for Hefsa blossoms, before the harvest moon” she winced slightly. “Because they only bloom for like 3 days a year, and--”

“Yes,” Viren said, with increasing caution. They were a key ingredient to the method she’d found of altering her hair color. There was never enough, with the rarity of the blooms, to do  _ all  _ of her hair, but Viren doesn’t doubt that if she were to find a more plentiful source, he’d never see it black again. 

He thought he might miss it, if it ever happened.

“Don’t get mad,” Claudia said, a phrase that caused Viren to tense muscles he’d forgotten he even  _ had,  _ “I…  _ might  _ have gotten into some trouble I didn’t tell you about. But it was fine! Which is why I didn’t say anything!”

“Claudia--” 

“It was no big deal I swear,” her words tumbled out like pebbles down a staircase. “There was a banther, I startled it by accident--”

“Claudia!” Viren scolded her for her carelessness retroactively. 

“--And Weird Woods Guy helped me out, because he lives there, right where the woods start. So after that, whenever I go out that way, I bring him stuff. Bread, tinctures, nothing big, but… we have so much, and he… really doesn’t. He’s a nice guy, and he’s old, and alone, and I felt bad.”

Viren sighed. The cold was beginning to bite at his nose and ears and fingertips in earnest. “At least you’ve managed to exercise some courtesy, even if _ caution  _ was apparently out of the question.”

“It must be hard for him to stay warm,” Claudia mused, finger on the side of her face in a gesture of thought -- she at least hadn’t grown out of  _ that  _ yet. “I bet he’s looking for firewood, that’s probably why he’s out.”

“You said he was alone?” Viren said, a darkness falling on his voice. 

“Yeah,” said Claudia, “he said his wife died, and they never had any kids, so…”

All of the sudden, Viren felt absolutely wretched for even  _ thinking  _ to complain about his own midwinter holiday. Here they were, in a  _ castle  _ that could very comfortably house and feed and warm at least three times its current occupancy (between those that had gone with the royal family and those that were visiting their own homes for the holiday) with no concern besides missing out on a few festivities. Meanwhile  _ Weird Woods Guy,  _ as Claudia had dubbed him, was cold and alone, probably more worried about survival than celebration. 

The image stirred memories of his own past, much less well-appointed than his present lifestyle. Even then, his father had worked so hard to shield him from the worst of that, and they’d had each other for company at midwinters, even when there was nothing else. Only a moment of imagining himself in the fellow’s shoes put a sour taste in his mouth about the cobbled-together version of the holiday that he’d begun to plan in his mind for his daughter, stuck in place as they were.

He knew himself well enough to know this would haunt him. 

“How long would you say it takes to get to his… dwelling?” Viren wondered, watching him struggle to break apart a twig. “On foot?”

“Mm, I don’t know, half an hour?” Claudia tossed the number out, a rough estimate at best. “That’s when the weather’s  _ good,  _ though.”

“We’ll have to dress warmly,” Viren said, without explanation of how his thoughts went from one point to the next. “It’s doable, though.”

“Wait--”

“You’re right,” Viren detailed at last, with a note of something that wasn’t quite mischief, but could have been, when he was younger. “It’s a matter of practicality. We have far more than we need in the present circumstances, and he does not. If we brought some… cured meats, some dried firewood, maybe some wine… no one would even notice it gone.”

“Wait,  _ really?”  _ Claudia’s eyes seemed to sparkle. Through a half-laugh, she said, “Are you sure?”

Viren almost protested, mildly wounded to discover that this was considered an unusual thing for him to do. All the more reason to do it, then. 

Once the necessary supplies were gathered, they set out into the snow. The wind had picked up again, and clouds were forming, shifting to veil the moon and stars intermittently. Cold needled at Viren’s face, but he didn’t say anything. This had been his idea, of course, even if Claudia  _ had  _ done something toward planting it, and he had to stand by it.

The wind picked up clumps of snow from the slopes before them and threw it across the field in quick arrows and tight spirals. It was impossible to see debris -- twigs, stones, and the like -- beneath the cover of white, and picking up his feet high enough to avoid obstacles was rapidly growing tiresome. Beside him, Claudia struggled at least as much, and he began to wonder if he should have done this on his own. 

Slicing through the field like a wild black stripe was the river. They had a choice to make: there was a bridge up the bank a ways, but to cross it would add at least a third more distance, and under the present conditions, the exposure was potentially treacherous. Much closer, a weathered ladder crossed a place where the river narrowed. 

In this, Claudia had the advantage -- what she lacked in the kind of power and endurance that her brother and mother possessed, she more than made up for in balance and agility -- so that was the way they would go, despite Viren’s trepidation about his own odds of making it across in one piece. 

He vacillated for a moment over whether he should go across first to ensure it was sturdy or allow Claudia across first in case it could bear her weight and not his, and in his moment of hesitation she charged ahead and took to the ladder, skirts in hand. 

Now  _ there,  _ she took after her mother. 

A rung snapped beneath her right foot. Viren’s heart nearly stopped. Before he could even shout, she planted her left where the next rung met the rail and launched herself the last short distance across to the opposite bank and into the deep snow there. She took a tumble, and wound up snow-covered and damp, but safe enough. 

“Maybe… don’t walk in the middle…” She shouted back with a wince, words half-swallowed by the wind. 

Viren threw the pack of food and wood across the gap. If he was going to fall in and freeze, he thought dryly, it might as well not be for  _ nothing.  _

A deep lungful of icy air later, he was on the ladder, careful to keep to the rails and steer clear of the broken spot. The inconvenience of this idea was rapidly eclipsing the pleasant feeling he’d had regarding its charitability. 

He only noticed that Claudia was holding her breath when he alighted on the bank and she exhaled.

Past the split in the land, they trudged on in near-silence. The pace was slower, and Viren couldn’t figure out  _ why  _ at first -- until the moment he turned, and Claudia adjusted her posture to hide a limp a moment too slowly. 

Anger rose like a hot line from navel to sternum, and it must have showed on his half-numb face. 

“I’m fine,” she said, a terrible, obvious lie. Her voice cracked when she said, “I can do this.”

“Yes, I suppose you have no choice,” Viren said, maybe a little coldly, but not because it was how he felt -- rather, because it for her own good. 

Apparently it was the right thing, because that seemed to steel her. 

“Walk behind me,” he said, “In the footprints.”

She did, and it went easier from there. Viren cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner. 

Later, in the safety and warmth of a firelit cabin, in a moment when their host had stepped out of the room, he would tell her the story his own father was so fond of, a tale of two young lads on a journey who found a wall in their path that was frighteningly high to climb, so they threw their caps over the wall.  _ How did that help?  _ Claudia would ask, and Viren would answer:  _ once they threw their caps over the wall, they had no choice but to follow.  _

“There!” Claudia pointed to a dim light between the trees. They shuffled forward against the wind, near enough now to see the shape of a face in the window, and the face seemed to see them, too. For a moment, Viren could have sworn he saw movement and a streak of light behind the glass. A candle, or a trick of the moon, perhaps. 

Claudia nearly stumbled, and Viren turned to catch her trying to bend look around him. 

“What are you doing?” He asked. 

“Trying to figure out if that’s  _ you  _ doing that or not,” Claudia said, a little irritably. “I didn’t see you do—”

“Do what?” Viren grumbled, the cold and wind and resistance of the snow making it hard to have tolerance for Claudia’s tendency to wander around the point. 

“The… warmth in the ground where you were walking, it felt like magic, I thought somehow I missed—”

“No, Claudia,” Viren dismissed. It was almost certainly just the difference between the direct strike of the wind as compared to walking behind him so it was broken, he thought, but it wasn’t worth the effort to say so. 

The face in the window watched until they were nearly upon the cabin. 

They knocked at the door, and were greeted with a confused face, but a kindly one. He was tall, despite his obvious advanced age, with the kind of frame that read as portly at first, but that a cautious person would discover hid muscle beneath. He was dark of complexion, his hair a cloud of white curls, poufing out from below a thick fur cap that had piles of layers on the top and flaps that covered his ears. 

When he saw Claudia, recognition dawned on his face and he invited them in, holding the door open with a mittened hand. 

“Thank you,” Viren said, once they were out of the wind and had managed their introductions. (The man introduced himself by the odd name of Old Rijy, and it sounded like he  _ almost _ said something entirely different. Viren noted this, but chose not to draw attention to it.) Shooting Claudia a sharp glance, Viren said, “I would have come sooner to say so, but I only learned just  _ today _ that you saved my daughter’s life.”

“Oh! I didn’t really do so much.” Old Rijy smiled, cheeks pinking. With a shifting, impossible-to-place accent, he said, “Anyway, she's already done more than enough for me, you didn’t have to come all the way out here in this weather--”

“Nonsense,” said Viren, firmly. “Please. It was no trouble. If nothing else, I want to extend apologies on behalf of the castle, if I had known you were in need—”

“Well you’re welcome to join me,” said Old Rijy, laughing, it seemed, at Viren’s assertion of need. “Wouldn’t want you going back out there right now in any case. It’ll be nice to have some company, and young Claudia here is such a nice young lady.”

Claudia flashed a smile that was  _ nearly  _ convincing in its innocence. Maybe there was hope yet for her, politically speaking. 

It was, by all accounts, a perfectly lovely meal, even if Old Rijy had, for some reason had to leave the room before he’d remove his mittens. They’d been right about the firewood, which had been running perilously low, and their host received the wine as though it were a vintage of much greater significance than was truly the case. 

“Old Rijy,” Claudia said, “I know we… brought you firewood and all, but you know, if you want, you can come stay with us.”

“I would _ never _ want to impose,” he said, in that warm, odd tone. 

They hadn’t discussed it, but a few glasses of wine in, Viren saw nothing but benefit: it cost the castle little to nothing, and would be a very good look both for himself and for the royals as a whole. So he said, “No imposition at all. You see,” he added with a glimmer of conspiracy, “we’ve found ourselves stranded. There’s almost nothing happening at the castle at all until the snow can be managed.”

“Are you… certain? I’m not a formal man, sir--”

“Viren,” corrected Viren. 

“Viren. I don’t spend a lot of time in polite company, I... don’t know all the h--Katolis-- customs, and--”

“Truly,” Viren said, enjoying the grin that Claudia had worn ever since she realized he was on board, “Trust me, no one will trouble you. If they did, I would put a stop to it myself.”

Old Rijy looked between them and said with a grin, “Well, alright then, I guess I could stay just ‘til the royals come back -- but then I’ll be hot-footing out of there, you hear me?”

“Of course,” Claudia said, laughing. 

When they all left together, Claudia wasn’t limping. The wind had died down, and perhaps it was the wine that warmed them for the trip back, and perhaps it was easier because they’d charted the path here already. 

Deep down, though, Viren knew the truth, which was that it wasn’t any of those things. 

He also knew it didn’t matter. The man turned out to be extremely popular with the castle staff, some of whom were convinced he was good luck. Besides that, while hospitality was always an imperative in Katolis, to exhibit anything less at midwinter in particular was the _ worst  _ of luck. And besides  _ that,  _ he still felt a sense of debt. 

All things considered, he would take more difficult secrets than this to the grave. 

  
  



End file.
